Coincidentally coming one day after the GNU Shepherd 1.0 service manager release, the systemd 257 release is now shipping as the newest feature release for this widely-used service manager / init system to Linux systems. Systemd 257 brings a number of new features and improvements for powering late 2024 and early 2025 Linux distributions.
Systemd 257 brings some new tools like systemd-keyutil and systemd-sbsign, improvements to various existing sub-commands, prepping for greater Varlink use, and more. Some of the quick systemd 257 highlights include:
- The "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" option is reworked to only apply to tmpfiles.d/ lines marked with the new "$" flag. This is to better address systemd's --purge deleting too many files by accident.
- Support for cgroup v1 is now considered obsolete and systemd by default will ignore configurations enabling them. Temporarily the SYSTEMD_CGROUP_ENABLE_LEGACY_FORCE=1 option allows re-enabling them. But systemd 258 plans to remove cgroup v1 support.
- Systemd 258 also aims to remove support for the (deprecated) System V service scripts support.
- The systemd JSON API is now available as a public interface of libsystemd via sd-json.
- The Varlink IPC API is now available with libsystemd via sd-varlink. This is part of systemd looking at greater use of Varlink moving forward.
- Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) is now supported as a socket protocol for .socket units.
- Simpler initialization of the system clock during boot and updates has been simplified.
- The kernels' Ctrl-Alt-Delete handling is now re-enabled during late shutdown.
- Generator processes invoked by the service manager will now receive a new environment variable of "$SYSTEMD_SOFT_REBOOTS_COUNT" to indicate how many times the system has been soft-rebooted.
- systemd-boot menu will now react to volume up/down rocker presses in the same way as arrow up/down presses. This is for smartphones and other devices that may have volume up/down rockers but not arrow keys.
- bootctl now optionally supports installing UEFI Secure Boot databases for systemd-boot to pick-up and automatically enroll in if the system is booted in Setup Mode.
- A new systemd-sbsign tool to sign EFI PE binaries.
- New fields have been added for /etc/os-release of RELEASE_TYPE=, EXPERIMENT=, EXPERIMENT_URL=.
- A number of patches to ease building systemd against the musl C library.
- The new systemd-keyutil tool for consolidating various key/certificate operations.
Those rolling systemd from source can grab the systemd v257 release via GitHub.